When Charles Cumming began work on his fourth book, Typhoon, the plight of the Uighur Muslims in the Chinese province of Xinjiang was not widely known. A year after publication, his spy novel about a feud between Uighur separatists and the Han Chinese has grabbed the world’s attention as it is played out on the streets of Urumqi.

Cumming, one of Britain’s leading thriller writers, admits he couldn’t have predicted the eruption of civil unrest that has led to 156 deaths so far, but he is not surprised by it. “It almost seemed to me that the situation in Xinjiang was an accident waiting to happen,” he says. “The way the Chinese government has treated the Uighurs over the past 30 years could only go on for so long before they started to fight back.”

Although Cumming, who was born in Ayr, couldn’t get a visa to enter Xinjiang during a visit to China to research his book, he interviewed people who spoke of brutal repression by the Chinese government in the far-flung, buffer-zone region known to the Uighurs — but not the Chinese — as East Turkestan.

He then incorporated their story into his novel about a CIA-inspired plan to use radicalised Uighurs to destroy China on the eve of the summer Olympics. “I was interested in the clash of civilisations between the Uighurs and the Han Chinese,” he says.

When the book came out in 2008, the conflict in Xinjiang was so obscure, some readers thought it as fictional as the rest of the plot. Cumming believes the government would have liked it to stay that way.

“The Chinese government has done a good job of repressing Uighur dissidents up ’till now. After riots broke out in 1990, they rounded up every young man aged between 16 and 60 and threw them in prison. After 9/11, they used that as an excuse to tar all Uighurs with the same terrorist brush. Any Uighur who complained was immediately branded as a terrorist.”

The recent carnage, Cumming claims, stems from decades of suppression of the Uighur identity, culture, history and language. “Young Uighur Muslims under 16 were forbidden to attend mosque. Women were not allowed to wear Islamic dress. And the vast majority of decent jobs went to Han Chinese,” he says.

“The Uighurs represent a threat to the image China wants to present of one race living in unity and harmony, but rather than being inclusive, the government’s attitude is to lock up the Uighurs or hope that they will go away. I do not see that changing.”

Cumming agrees that the ill-treatment of this group does not justify the slaughter of innocent Han Chinese last Sunday, but he says: “They had their reasons.” However, he doesn’t believe the killings will bring about change. “The situation will get worse, although the riots will not be reported once the journalists are pushed out. There will certainly be more arrests until there are not enough people left to cause trouble.”

Typhoon is not the first book in which Cumming, 38, has used real events as a backdrop to his fiction. His debut novel, A Spy By Nature, was based on his own experience of being approached by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to work for MI6.

“It was through a family friend who I met at a dinner party. Several days later he buttonholed my mother in the local Sainsbury’s and asked if I had thought of joining the diplomatic service,” he says. “It was very appealing in the beginning. I was 24 and I was not really doing anything with my life.”

Cumming had just graduated from Edinburgh University with a first class honours degree in English Literature. At the time he was working part-time in a Polish restaurant in London, trying to figure out a career plan.

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